Spinning Programming Plates and Creative Algorithms

Talking Machines is your window into the world of machine learning. Your hosts, Katherine Gorman and Neil Lawrence, bring you clear conversations with experts in the field, insightful discussions of industry news, and useful answers to your questions. Machine learning is changing the questions we can ask of the world around us, here we explore how to ask the best questions and what to do with the answers.

On episode eight we talk with Charles Sutton, a professor in the School of Informatics University of Edinburgh about computer programming and using machine learning how to better understand how it’s done well. Ryan introduces us to collaborative filtering, a process that helps to make predictions about taste. Netflix and Amazon use it to recommend movies and items. It's the process that the Netflix Prize competition further helped to hone. Plus, we take a listener question on creativity in algorithms.